Stefano Cresci

Stefano Cresci is a senior researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of Italy's National Research Council (IIT-CNR) in Pisa, working at the intersection of the web, society, and artificial intelligence. He earned a PhD in information engineering from the University of Pisa in 2018 and works within the institute's cyber-intelligence group, where his research spans content moderation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, disinformation, and social computing. He is a senior co-author of 'The Great Ban,' a 2024 study analysing Reddit's 2020 mass deplatforming of nearly two thousand toxic communities and its effects on user toxicity and platform abandonment, and he served as project leader for the study's public dataset. In 2023 he was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for the DEDUCE project on the effectiveness of content moderation, and he previously received the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award.